1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to networking and communications technology.
2. Description of the Background Art
Network traffic mirroring (or monitoring) is a process by which network traffic is sent to a mirror (or monitor) port or interface, in addition to the intended destination of the traffic. A network monitoring device or network analyzer may be attached to the mirror port/interface to detect problems in the network.
Conventional mirroring logic does not anticipate the port speed or capacity of the monitoring device. As such, the mirroring device may send more packets to the monitoring device than the monitoring device can handle. When the input buffer of the monitoring device overflows, the monitoring device may drop packets without regard to their importance or ordering. This may cause the monitoring device to obtain poorly distributed subsets of the data traffic that it wants to monitor.
It is desirable to improve networking and communications technology. In particular, it is desirable to improve apparatus and methods of mirroring network traffic.